In these days of reality TV, cameras capture the events and happenings of individuals and families as they go about their day to day lives. I wonder how many of us would be riveted by the goings on in the Isaac and Rebekah household that is found in the Old Testament. Isaac and Rebekah have two boys and name them Esau and Jacob. Unusually there does not seem to be much of a bond between the twins. Esau became a skilled hunter, a man who loved the outdoor life, but Jacob was a quiet man who stayed at home Genesis 25:27 Good News Bible.)
Perhaps the brothers were not helped by their parents who preferred one twin over the other. Isaac favoured Esau and Rebekah Jacob.
One incident illuminates the different agendas Isaac and Rebekah have for their “favourite”. Isaac summons Esau and tells his son “You see that I am old and may die soon. Take your bow and arrows, go out into the country, and kill an animal for me. Cook me some of that tasty food that I like, and bring it to me. After I have eaten it I will give you my final blessing before I die.” (Genesis 27: 2-4 Good News Bible) Rebekah overhears and forms a plan. She persuades Jacob to trick his father into believing that he (Jacob) is Esau. Rebekah puts onto Jacob Esau’s best clothes and covers his arms and neck with the skin of goats. Isaac whose sight was failing is taken in by the deception and blesses Jacob. When Esau returns and asks his father to bless him, Isaac (mortified that he has been deceived) informs Esau “I have already made him (Jacob) master over you, and I have made all his relatives his slaves. I have given him corn and wine. Now there is nothing that I can do for you, my son!” (Genesis 27:37 Good News Bible)
Betrayal, the most destructive of actions, rips apart the family once and for all. Esau is set on spilling the blood of his twin. Rebekah protects her boy by sending Jacob away to stay with her brother. At the same time she puts herself in a vulnerable position at home. It will now be two against one. Rebekah will cease to exist in the eyes of Isaac and Esau.
What is the saying, “You can choose your friends but you cannot choose your relatives.” Lord God, forgive me for my actions and attitudes to my family that have been less than loving!
One opinion about Rebekah’s actions is to say that she is cynical, selfish and manipulative. However there is another viewpoint that I would like to put forward.
If we go back to the time where Isaac and Rebekah enjoyed the happiness and excitement that new love creates, Isaac prays for Rebekah because she had no children. The Lord hears Isaac’s prayer and Rebekah falls pregnant with twins. However Rebekah senses that within her womb there is hostility between the two boys. Unable to comprehend why this should be she asks the Lord for an answer. “The Lord says to her, two nations are within you; you will give birth to two rival peoples. One will be stronger than the other; the older will serve the younger.” (Genesis 25: 23 GNB)
Later when Rebekah overhears her husband declaring he will bless Esau, I wonder if she fears God’s prophecy will not come true and so she decides to give a helping hand.
For myself I wouldn’t dare say that I have the only hotline to God, but I wonder how often I believe (and have believed) God desires the church should move in a certain direction, or consider (and have considered) a course of action should be taken because I think I have God on my side believing I am helping the Eternal’s cause.
Let’s refocus on Esau and Jacob. There seems to be a viewpoint in the world of association football that you should “never say never”. In other words there is a possibility that what would seem to be the unlikeliest of scenarios could happen. It would seem would it not that Esau and Jacob given their personality and history could never enter in a reconciliation; how wrong we would be. Here is how it happened.
Jacob experience of family (this time with his uncle Laban) is once again one of deceit and lies. (You can read his experiences in chapters 29, 30 and 31 of Genesis) Jacob leaves his uncles like a thief in the night. The Lord instructs him to return to his land and his relatives. However Jacob is fearful when he hears that Esau is riding to meet him with four hundred men. He seeks to deflect his brother’s anger by sending a substantial amount of livestock as a gift. When the brothers finally meet Jacob bows to the ground seven times as he approached his brother. Esau runs to Jacob embraces him and kisses him (Is there not an echo here of the father welcoming the prodigal son?)
I wonder if Esau’s action is the first recorded act of grace between one human and another in the bible? Esau has offered undeserved forgiveness and welcomed Jacob as an equal. Both brothers have come a long way since living with their parents; their relationship can move forward positively in the days to come.
The meeting between Esau and Jacob reminds me of an episode between God and Israel in Hosea chapter 11. I’ll let Hosea speak for the Lord.
“When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son. But the more I called Israel the further they went from me. They sacrificed to the Baals and they burned incense to images. It was I who taught Ephraim to walk, taking them by the arms; but they did not realise that it was I who healed them. I led them with cords of human kindness. With ties of love; I lifted the yoke from their neck and bent down to feed them.
Will they not return to Egypt and will not Assyria rule over them because they refuse to repent? Swords will flash in their cities, will destroy the bars of their gates and put an end to their plans. My people are determined to turn from me. Even if they call to the Most High, he will by no means exalt them.
How can I give you up, Ephraim? How can I hand you over, Israel? How can I treat you like Admah? How can I make you like Zeboiim? My heart is changed within me; all my compassion is aroused. I will not carry out my fierce anger, nor will I turn and devastate Ephraim.” (Hosea 11:1-9 New International Version)
I want to trust in the fact that love is the most powerful force in the Universe. I want to believe that the reconciliation between Esau and Jacob is a beacon of hope for humanity!!!!
SHALOM
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7 comments:
Seems to me that living as if (in the sentiments of your last paragraph) that love is the strongest force in the universe is the essence of faith, and is the way of Jesus and the way for his disciples. Thanks trinityblogger
Yes Julyan and it can be a hard way on occasions but what other way can resurrection hope and action come about? Would be good to hear from you and others opinion on the different paths in the bible the brothers take. Is Esau the hero of the story? If he is why is Jacob seemingly more favoured by God? Jacob is given the name "Israel". The Eternal refers to himself in scripture as "the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. What about Esau? Further why does God choose such role models as Abraham, Isaac and Jacob? They all had flawed characters. Perhaps hope for us all yet!!
Shalom friends
The following is a contribution from Dijon. It is in three parts as the text will not be able to be displayed in one post.
When I read in the piece about Jacob and Esau that reference to TV and its window into the way people (some people, that is!) behave, it dawned on me that the story of the family of Isaac and Rebecca is indeed the ancient equivalent of a soap opera. The story of Jacob and Rachel which follows is another. In an age when broadcasting was not possible and a culture in which theatre as we understand it was not practiced, the nearest the ancient people of the Middle East, like most other contemporary societies, could get to a soap opera was the folk-tale told by story-tellers, who sometimes went from place to place to entertain crowds which would gather either to hear the latest tale or to enjoy re-visiting an old and familiar one. One of the reasons why the teaching of Jesus was popular is likely to have been that he told good stories, and in those days anyone who stood up in public with a story would quickly attract an audience. Story-tellers were very popular figures until quite recently. In the Old Testament case, one imagines the audience having a great time hearing the exploits of families as dysfunctional as anything you might find in East Enders. In most fiction from the past, as today, the focus was on misbehaviour, good behaviour being regarded as dull and uninteresting. In Hebrew Scripture the tales were in most cases, as in the story of the family of Isaac and Rebecca, about famous ancestors, but that didn’t prevent the story-tellers from depicting some very unwholesome – and therefore ‘interesting’ – words and actions.
I agree that a very important twist in this story is the reconciliation episode. It must have been an important popular theme in that culture because it crops up again in the story of Joseph, and there were earlier hints of it in the disgraceful activities of yet another flawed hero, Abraham, in his dealings with Abimelech, king of Gerar [Gen 20]. The reconciliation of Jacob and Esau is remarkable also because the act of forgiveness came from Esau, father of the Edomites, whom Israel regarded as an enemy, and I see there another parallel with the Abraham story because in that case it was Abimelech the alien who showed magnanimity. The magnanimity of God, also the wronged party, reconciling himself with his people is, of course, a recurrent theme in Hebrew Scripture, and that, it seems clear, was an example that humans were intended to follow. It strikes me that the Esau story may have appealed to Jesus on two counts: firstly it’s about forgiveness and reconciliation, an emphasis central to the good news of the Gospel, and secondly, and surprisingly, it’s the non-Jewish [sorry, that’s an anachronistic term at this point in history, but you know what I mean] – the non-Jewish actor who demonstrated Godlike grace.
Part 2 of Dijon's contribution.
As to the origins of the story of Jacob and Esau, I imagine that it is midrashic to the core. It presumably retains some long-cherished anecdotes about the Patriarchs referred to, but adds a lot of fanciful literary detail to make up a good yarn. To say that is not, of course, to deny that there is possibly some factual history tucked away in there; indeed, some Christians will understand the story as being pretty reliable history throughout, and that’s a respectable position to take, though it’s not mine. And I’m not saying that the story isn’t ‘true’. It contains a great amount of truth about human behaviour and, incidentally, reveals something of the writer’s own view of matters. It’s simply that the psychological insight of the story matters more to me than trying to find out what actually happened all those years ago. That, after all, is what Jewish midrash, or commentary, set out to do both in writing the text of the Bible and later in interpreting it.
The writer observed the fact that there were two nations, Israel and Edom, which had long been at one another’s throats. Israel was, of course, in his mind top nation – though how far that perception squares with the facts one can’t now say, but it’s an example of the usual way that people think about their own ‘side’. Clearly, for him, if this was the case, then it must have been God’s will: it wouldn’t have happened if it were not somehow “in the plan”. So he set out to explain how this had all come about. Firstly God’s role must be made clear, so we read that God told Rebecca what would happen while she was still pregnant. How similar that is to several other Biblical stories of the pregnant mother being told about the future of their offspring – Sarah, Hagar, the (unnamed) mother of Samson, Elisabeth, Mary. The next task was to explain how things turned out in practice and what was the human agency that enabled God’s plan to be fulfilled. So we read the story of the stolen Birthright and then the stolen Blessing. How these two things are to be separated I don’t understand, because they seem to me to amount to pretty much the same thing – the conferring on Jacob of a future that should naturally have belonged to his elder brother. But, at any rate, there they are.
The Blessing story poses problems for the modern mind. The idea that Isaac sensed that death was near and so he’d better get on with the formal Blessing bit is understandable: maybe he ought to have thought about it earlier in case death should overtake him unexpectedly, but it’s human to put off things like making a will till the last minute. The haste about it all when push came to shove is a nice comic passage in the story. What bothers me is the idea that Isaac would have fallen for the ruse of the disguise. The smell of Esau’s clothing is maybe a convincing notion, but the voice? He recognised that that wasn’t right, yet he was convinced by the goat-skin. Did Esau’s arms really feel like a goat? And could Jacob’s hands have been satisfactorily disguised in that way? That might work in a panto, but not in the real world, I think. As it happens, I believe that the story is a midrashic fiction which is much like a panto – a story of the triumph of good over evil, not meant to be understood as history.
To us, perhaps, it is curious that Isaac was irrevocably bound by the action he had mistakenly taken. In a rational world one would suppose the old sheik could have summoned Jacob and given him a right dressing-down, and then revoked his blessing and given it to Esau, whose right it was. But the ancient idea was that a Blessing was what was called a “performative act” which actually set in train there and then what was promised, so it couldn’t be undone, any more than a loosed arrow could be recalled.
Part 3 of Dijon's contribution.
The great thing about so many Biblical sorties (NT as well as OT) is that they celebrate flawed heroes. Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Saul, David, Samson, Peter, Paul – the list might go on. Actually, that’s a feature of much ancient storytelling. Just by way of examples, in Greece there was Odysseus, in Rome Aeneas, and England had Lancelot and Gawain. And the Gospel is firm about the fact that, however flawed we all may be, grace may yet overtake us. Even the fictional oiks in East Enders and the real live weirdoes in Big Brother and The Apprentice are not beyond redemption!
But I, too, come back to the theme of reconciliation, and I do believe that it is possible for the most deep-seated enmities to be ended by acts of grace by the injured parties. We have seen this in South Africa: and Aung San Suu Kyi, speaking for the oppressed Burmese, is trying to bring about reconciliation in her country. Her chances still look pretty bleak, but I remember how, during the deepest days of apartheid, Desmond Tutu used to say that all was going to change for the better; few people believed him, but his Christian-inspired hope turned out to be justified, and change may yet come to Burma, too. One day I believe we shall see a rapprochement even between Israel and the Palestinians. On a more domestic level, my own experience both abroad and in Britain isn’t short of examples of individuals and small groups bringing reconciliation about in all manner of simple circumstances. I think we have every right to see Esau as a beacon of hope. Humanity being what it is, there will always be plenty of disappointments, and on this side of the grave I don’t expect the world simply to become lovely, but there’s a lot of grace about, too.
Dijon July 2011
In the light of Dijon's very interesting and thought provoking comments, I wondered about the sort of stories we tell each other these days. The day of the meta-narrative is gone; we do not all share one dominant story, or, if not sharing it, oppose it. The internet and other mass media developments mean that we now hear myriad small stories, stories that catch on or fade away, go viral or are ignored. What are the stories that shape our thinking today and how do we critique them? What would be the place of Esau in a culture where many voices are heard and where he might find a champion in an environment where history does not always belong to the victor?
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